With the latest push towards the pastel theme, there have been some questions as to why it's necessary to drop support for the old themes. I am fully aware that a number of you are very used to the way FUMBBL looks, and feel the change is compeltely unnecessary.

In an attempt to try to explain my perspective and the thinking behind this, I will go through my thought process behind the change, and try to explain what I am trying to achieve.

Over the years, newcomers to the site have been stating that they thought the layout of the site has been confusung and complex to get used to. This is something I have been trying to take to heart and I have been trying to make the site easier to use over time, adding new themes with the help of members of the community. Adding a theme is one of the most frustrating things I do on the site, because there are so many people who oppose change and there's an endless stream of complaints over one aspect or the other. Meanwhile, making a new design is incredibly difficult both from a usability and visual perspective, but also amazingly frustrating from a technical perspective. I am aiming to keep the site functional and properly rendered for a wide range of web broswers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari) on a range of platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android). All this ends up making it very hard to keep motivated to do.

Now, A lot of the complaints tend to start incredibly harshly stating "This theme is complete garbage", and then the only concrete feedback is something along the lines of "I am missing feature X", or "This particular colour is different than what I am used to". I want to take the time to address some of this feedback on a high level.


First off, I want to talk about the colour scheme.

When I first got in touch with Whatball regarding the theme, he had done some initial suggestions on the forums. His mockup was dark gray overall and had a simplified navigation system compared to what the old themes of the site had. In my initial "specification", I gave him a very very rough outline of what I was aiming for and stated that I wanted the theme to have three primary colours: beige, green and red. Now you ask why those colours, and the answer is that those are the colours that, to me, are the official colours of FUMBBL. These colours have been with FUMBBL from the start as can be seen in the v1 (version 1) theme, and you will also see them in the most recent "Root" theme, with the name pointing towards going back to the origins when it comes to rough layout and colour scheme (coming from the "Pool" theme which was the default prior to Root).

To me, this combination of colours is a major part of the identity of the site. The particular shades have not been set in stone at any point (and you'll see that with how variants have been used over different themes). Some of the feedback I've seen with the pastel theme is that the colours are burning people's eyes out (yes, literally), which surprises me. Yes, the colours are probably more saturated than in the past but I absolutely don't agree with the notion of it being too hard on the eyes. However, I use colour calibrated screens to view the site and see the colours as they were meant to be seen. When I'm picking colours I simply have to pick something that looks good on my screen and hope that the end users' screens are not too far off from being correct. For those of you who are wondering, the site is designed for a colour temperature of 6500K and gamma 2.2 (which is pretty much a de-facto standard these days). For the rest of you, ignore that last sentence :)


Next up, I want to talk a bit about fixed versus dynamic width.

The new theme is the first one which is using a fixed width. As was the case with the primary colours, this was a direct request in my initial dialogue with Whatball. I was very aware that this would upset some people, but chose to make this call anyway. And now you are asking why.

As I stated earlier, designing websites is hard. Other than the colours, you need to figure out where to put various links and buttons, how the navigation system should work and how each page on the site should look. With a site like FUMBBL, where we have a very very large number of different pages and systems that interact, it's incredibly difficult to make things look proper and consistent.

Designing a complex page (for example the overview) is a major undertaking. It looks simple when you can just state that "Put a teams list there, put a list of latest news there", but in reality it's much more complex than that. Most of these blocks have content that varies in width and I, as the person who has to make things work, have to be sure that it renders properly on a wide variety of platforms. Now, I have a screen with a higher resolution than the majority of the users on this site (running at 2560x1440), and maximising the browser window on that screen makes the old themes look very strange when it comes to layout. There simply isn't enough content to fill up that width and it ends up having more whitespace than content in the page itself.

To me, there are two basic forms of pages on the site, which both behave badly on extreme widths:

1. Pages with tables (overview, team page, coach lists, etc)
These end up being expanded and whitespace fills up the content of the page. Stretching them out hurts readability and it just plainly looks strange.

2. Pages with text (forum, blogs, help system)
Stretching out a block of text too wide makes it difficult to read. The human eye has a hard time tracking long lines, and paragraphs have a tendency to be cut down to a very low number of lines. Again, the visual layout of the page suffers. Granted, I have a tendency to make very short paragraphs when I write anyway and my own posts would end up with 2-3 line paragraphs across the board.

To counter both of these, the decision I made was to request a fixed width. That way, designing pages for the site won't be impossibly hard and I can focus on adding features rather than spending hundreds of hours on making a page look decent (I'm of the opinion that it's impossible to make a page look good when it's on the wide end because of the issues explained above).

I'm also not alone in this. Take a look at the web in general. There are endless examples of major websites which use a fixed width layout. Facebook, Google, Twitter, CNN, BBC, Huffington post, Apple, Microsoft, Steam, battle.net.. These all use fixed width and I'm pretty sure it's for reasons similar to the ones I've listed above.

Yes, there are also major sites which use dynamic width. Amazon and Wikipedia comes to mind, both of which start to become hard to read maximised on a typical 24" screen (1900x1200 resolution).


Even though this blog is turning out to become quite long, I have a third aspect I wanted to bring up: Legacy support for old themes.

FUMBBL has 11 current themes: Pitch, Plastic (3 variations),Pool, Root, Aggressive (2 variations), Pastel, v1, v3

There are also two obsoleted ones: FUMBBL and v2

The thing with supporting multiple themes is that when I make a change to the site, for example let's say I add a new page for managing your personal menu (yes, I will add that to the pastel theme). To make that display properly on the major browsers and platforms, I have to spend time on updating each and every theme manually. It's not a simple matter of just adding a page and saying "This needs to be green". I have to verify that the font sizes are proper across the themes, I have to verify that the layout doesn't break any of the themes and I have to test it for all 10 themes in all browsers. Mind you, testing Internet Explorer is not trivial for me being a mac user. Especially since I would ideally want to test for multiple versions of it (7, 8, 9) when you consider that they can't be run on the same installation of Windows.

Some of you may say that "But Christer.. If the themes are properly designed and use a common API from the site, it's quite possible to make it work seamlessly and easily", and sure, you're right. However, the sad fact is that the current themes are not designed that way, and I simply can't redesign 10 themes to fit a more modern way of doing things. The Pastel theme has an improved technical design and there will be new themes in the future based on the same technical foundation which will allow me to maintain and support multiple themes. Right now, though, I feel that I have no choice but to cut the legacy support and deal with the complaints. The alternative would be to spend an incredible amount of time on themes rather than content such as the League division restructuring I have mentioned in the past. Spending hundreds, if not thousands, of hours on reworking old themes which are used by a handful of people simply isn't something I can do. I do respect that you want to keep your old themes but in the end I feel that I had to make the call to cut support for the old themes in order to take the site as a whole forward at the pace I want.


As with all major decisions and calls I've made over the years, I've spent time thinking things over and what you see happening with the themes of the site is the conclusion I have made based on rational decisions and necessary for me to reach the goals I want in a reasonable time-frame.

Now, there's of course a possibility of migrating the layout of the old themes into the new theme framework that pastel uses, but this is not something I can dedicate time to at this point.


There. I hope you all have at least some understanding of where this new theme comes from, and why I feel it's necessary to cut the cord when it comes to the old themes. If you've read all of this rambling, you deserve a break by now. Thank you for your time.